


a heavy leaf to turn

by Legendaerie



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendly Haunting, Ghost Sex, Haunting, M/M, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 02:03:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14781521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legendaerie/pseuds/Legendaerie
Summary: “Infinite, Jean. The timeline where you live to old age is one of countless others. It’s like guiding you along a thread of glass.”





	a heavy leaf to turn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wingsofbadass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingsofbadass/gifts).



> i don't know what I'm doing either. title is from [Portugal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2_G9mfd2zY) by Walk The Moon.

Twenty five years old, Jean Kirstein closes the door to his quarters with the heel of a well-worn too-tight boot and freezes. The latch clicks behind him. The figure sitting on the bed, there and not-there at once, smiles.

“It's been a while,” Marco says. Jean stares, considering.

“Yeah,” he agrees, oddly calm at the sight of a ghost, “it has.”

He tries to fall into the routine of undressing for the night, quick fingers stripping off the 3DMG, but can’t settle into the groove. Not with those eyes on him, bright and distracting like the sun in his tiny room. 

This isn't the first time he’s been haunted. If one would call it that. It happens every few months, sporadically. Less frequent now, as Jean is less on the front lines and more about drawing them all over maps to outline strategies. The first time it happened, though, it scared him half to death.

“You know, after all this time, I still haven't figured out if this is supposed to be a blessing or a curse,” Jean mumbles, easing the straps off his shoulders and thumbing an old scar that the leather has pinched.

Marco’s voice, more in his head than anything, is as warm and inscrutable as ever. “Do you mean for you, or for me?”

Jean shakes his head. “Forget I asked.”

If only he could be happy to see him. If only Marco’s presence was like it was when they were both young and alive; an anchor. A comfort.

“So,” Jean says instead, “what's going to try to kill me this time?”

Marco leans back on the heels of his hands. For a moment, as Jean’s mood stutters into the morbid, one arm disappears entirely and leaves a gaping wound in its place.

“One of your men is unloyal,” Marco says. “Don't drink anything at lunch.”

Jean snorts. “That's all?”

The look Marco throws him is one with only half a face. “It's not enough?” he asks.

No. It isn't. It's never enough. 

“You're not gonna tell me who’s trying to poison me?” he presses, peeling off his shirt. Considers throwing it at Marco, but even with both arms a ghost can’t catch anything.

“You know I can't.” Marco tilts his head again, empty eye studying. “You're picturing me dead again, aren't you?”

“No,” and Jean yanks off his pants with a scowl.

“I can tell. I can feel it.”

That gets his attention. “Shit. Does it hurt when I do?”

Marco shakes his head, face reforming with the movement. “It only hurts because I can see it hurts you.”

His shoulders slump. Relief or guilt, it's hard to say which of the two is more prominent. “Not my fault you're dead,” he mutters, and wishes he knew that for certain. 

Another thing Marco can’t tell him. Another invisible rule dictating these infrequent, momentary interactions. Jean glances at the clock and wonders how many seconds he has left.

“Curse,” Marco says abruptly. 

Jean blinks. “Huh?”

“It's a curse, right? To you?”

It is. But he hesitates to agree. Something is slipping from behind that carefully controlled mask. The ghost looks almost human.

“Can't it be both?” he asks, greedy as ever, and snuffs out the oil lamp. Time’s up, and he crawls blindly into bed, the same bed Marco had perched on before he killed the light. It's cold and hardly inviting, but it's familiar.

So is the voice that whispers in the dark.

“Greedy,” Marco chides, and as Jean’s eyes adjust he can make out the faint shape sitting on his knees, weightless and heavy all at once. “I have my own orders, you know. My own set of wings.”

A tap to his shoulder and then, unfurling pale and golden, Jean sees a flash of what might have been wings from Marco’s back. He’s hit with a memory he's not sure he owns of sheets hung out to dry in early morning sunlight, billowing in the wind, fanning the scents of lye and lavender into his nose. Just as quickly, they vanish.

This is unusual. “Orders you're breaking by still being here,” Jean guesses. “By telling me this.”

Marco looks down at his hands. “Why both?” he asks, soft and small. Like the Marco he would hear from the neighboring bed in the dark, chanting assurances under his breath to calm himself after a nightmare.

“A blessing because you keep me alive, obviously,” Jean relates, and stumbles over the second part. It's not something he’s really admitted to a lot of people. Himself, yes, and Armin once. To the crystallized Annie, when he had learned of her Titan powers and her betrayal. “And… a curse because I… I loved you.”

The speed with with Marco’s head snaps to look at him is supernatural. Terrifying. Titan-esque in it's uncanny nature.

“Oh,” Marco whispers. “So that's why.”

“It hurts to see you, sometimes,” Jean mutters, rubbing his face with his hands. It's not as embarrassing as he thought it would be. As far as love confessions go, it's the smoothest one he’s ever had. Pity it's for a dead man.

“And that's why I'm here,” the ghost continues, shifting to kneel over him without really moving - just jumping from one pose to the other. He’s so close, Jean is hyper aware of his opacity; the moonbeams visible through his cheek on the wall behind him. His heart skips a beat for another reason. “I was in love with you too.”

Jean stares at him a moment longer, then laughs. No joy in the sound, in the moment. “Of fucking course you were,” he says at last. “Just my luck that I didn't figure out until after I burned your body.”

There's a little bone fragment he keeps in a pouch in his uniform jacket, with no reason to believe it used to host the young man perched above him. But he can't bring himself to throw it away.

Marco closes his eyes and pitches forward. Struck dumb, it takes Jean a moment to realize the ghost is trying to rest his forehead against Jean’s. He doesn't feel anything, though. Or maybe he does but it's all in his head, even more so than the whole, repeating scenario of being haunted for minutes at a time every year.

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you,” Marco whispers. Jean shrugs, lifts his arms to mine placing them on Marco’s insubstantial shoulders.

“I think you did. In all the little things. I just didn't listen until it was too late.”

He expected this to hurt, but it doesn't. It's been years. He’s healed, or just scarred, from the loss in his childhood. The void has been patched with time into a dull twinge, a reflex in the sight of every beautiful thing to turn and ask for Marco’s opinion on it.

This is why it's a blessing and a curse; he lost Marco, but counts himself lucky to have had him at all.

“You okay?” he asks the ghost. It's weird to have their positions reversed. For once, he's the one offering comfort.

Marco takes in a deep breath. “Yeah,” he whispers, and Jean swears he feels the breath on his lips from the sigh. “I… I should be going.”

“What happens if you don't?”

“Don't know. I could get… stuck here.” Marco pulls back enough that Jean can almost make out his eyes in the dark, so big and so dark, like the empty sockets of a skull. “Not so bad if I'm with you, but after that-- you'd go and I would be here. Until forever ends.”

“Well, don't do  _ that _ ,” Jean teases, covering up the panic that the idea brings him, pushing him to the brink of unfathomable eternity. “Go, then. Shoo. I won't eat anything tomorrow, I promise.”

“I'll be back,” Marco whispers, leaning in again. 

Jean lets his eyes close. “I know,” he murmurs, and doesn't open them again until the morning.

  


* * *

  


At the military dinner, near the head of the table, Commander Jean Kirstein swills the wine around in his cup. He can't smell anything wrong with it, and it's a fine press to be sure.

Beside him, Military Police Commander Hitch Dreyse kicks his ankle.

“If you don't want it, I'll drink it.”

She makes a grab for it; a flash of panic and he spills it across the table between them, soaking into the wood like blood. Hitch throws him a hurt look.

“Sorry,” he whispers. Their relationship has been strained at times, but she is technically the only other member of the 104th at this dinner, and has at times been his friend. If it comes to another coup, there's no one else in the MP who would hesitate to behead him.

“Rude,” she mutters, and drains her own cup, waving down a serving maid for a refill. “Water for the horse, too,” and she gestures at Jean.

Another maid dabs up the spilled wine. The conversation of their dinner mates swells and conceals the silence at the head of the table. Hitch waits until the Garrison Commander gets going on another long winded tale to throw Jean a flirtatious look.

“What's eating you?” she asks, her words and the sharp stare of her hazel-green eyes at odds with her body language and tone. She is a shifter of a different kind, an uncanny master of lying, and Jean slaps on a leer of his own.

“I've got friends in high places who said not to drink the wine,” he grins, keeping his voice scarce above a whisper.

“Only you?” she asks. He shrugs. Her facade falters as she stares at her new cup, untouched. “We all die one day anyway,” she shrugs and takes another long draw. “And people like me a lot more than they do you.”

He can't argue with that. The server fills brings him a new cup of water and he's just about to drink when Hitch grabs a handful of his hair and yanks him over for a kiss.

It's painful and greasy from the roast meat he’s been eating, and her mouth tastes like vinegar and good wine, but it winds him when she pulls away.

She whispers something, but his eyes catch movement on the far side of the hall. A flash of cream, a scent of soap and flowers and the rancid smell of death, and Jean falls backwards out of his chair.

  


* * *

  


“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he chants to himself, safe in the confines of one of the King’s washing rooms. Commander Shepherd had spilled her wine all over his dress clothes when he’d fallen backwards, and he’s insisted on washing the shirt himself. Gives him a chance to collect his thoughts after the scene in the dining room.

Jean wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. He can't taste Hitch at all but still remembers her touch. He's had a few kisses in his life - not as many as he would have liked, or from the people he would have wanted the most - and after the initial giddy feeling starts to ebb he concludes that it sucked.

“You don't have to wait for me,” says a voice from behind him. Jean glances up at the window above the sink but sees nothing in the reflection. “If you love her, don't let me hold you back.”

“I don't,” he gripes, keeping his back to the ghost. “I think she was just trying to mess with me. Right?”

“I don't know her. I only know you. The paths your life could take.” A flicker of movement at his side and Marco is standing beside him, young and whole and only a couple inches past his shoulder. “Spreading out forever.”

“Like ripples in water?” Jean asks, flicking water at Marco’s face. They pass right through him, but it makes Jean feel sixteen again to do it.

“Like cracks in glass,” Marco clarifies. He ages before Jean’s eyes, catching up to him in a moment. A little more hair, a little less freckles. 

Now he knows it isn't all in his head, because if Jean would have had his way Marco would have been covered in freckles, the little brown flecks like kisses from the sun.

“Why are you here this time?” he asks. “Assassin outside the door?”

“You called me. I always come when you call.” A transparent hand reaches out to touch the ruby-stained water in the sink. “This is just the first time you've heard me.”

“Marco--” 

It's been years since he voiced the name. It tastes sweet and heavy in his mouth, like the hint of wine on Hitch’s lips, but Marco isn't there any more. The door opens.

Speak of the devil. “Hey, dinner is canceled. I had a guard take a sip of your water and he started vomited blood.” Hitch’s voice is nonchalant, only pitching up with irritation when she stares at the sink. “Who the hell taught you how to do laundry? Move.”

She hip checks him out of the way, ringing pink water out of the white shirt and scowling. 

“Why the hell did you kiss me?” he asks, stunned into his own matching anger.

“Keep you from drinking. And I was right. They’d poisoned the cup, not the fluid that went into it.” Hitch hangs up the shirt with a flourish. “Easier to see the oil in the clear water. Good idea.”

Too late, he realizes he should have asked about the guard. “Next time, don't use people as test subjects. We've lost enough men already.”

“I'm sure he’ll be fine. I'm more upset about this wine. It's older than we are combined.”

Jean stares at her back, emblazoned with the green unicorn of the military branch he almost joined, and turns away with a tsk.

  


* * *

  


Twenty six years old, Jean wakes up in the middle of the night in a sweat to see Marco at the foot of his bed.

“Oh, what the hell?” he asks, shaking his head. “This still part of the fucking dream?”

“No.” Marco’s face is in profile again, in half again, and when Jean lights the lamp at his bedside congealing blood drips off his face to vanish before it hits the wool blanket. 

“Where have you been? I've called you a dozen times since then--”

“Like anything worth doing, it takes effort,” Marco cuts him off. Jean sits up and tries to hit him with his pillow. At least Marco has the mercy to try to block the blow and flinch. 

Fury sated for the moment, Jean lays back down, arms crossed behind his head. “So? What is it this time? Guns? Guillotines?”

“Change your gear out tomorrow. The hooks won't attach right. They’re too stiff.”

A rough way to go. Crushed between a titan’s teeth or slammed against a wall. “So, when you know these things--”

More blood drops down, welling from his broken eye socket and dropping down his chin. “I see it happen.”

Jean swallows. “How many ways have I--”

“Infinite, Jean.” Marco tilts his head back and to the side, staring at him with a glassy brown eye. “The timeline where you live to old age is one of countless others. It’s like guiding you along a thread of glass.”

“The timeline where humanity wins? Is that the same one?”

Marco smiles, weary and sad. “I don't know. I can only see you. Only the next few steps, and where they entwine with others.”

Jean steels himself. “When Erwin died, did you see that coming? Levi? Marlon? Eren and Mikasa?”

In the space of a moment, Marco is straddling him again, his face whole and pale with anguish.

“I'm doing everything I can, okay? I'm trying.” His expression buckles, but the tears he cries are red and never hit Jean’s face. “This is the best I can do. These warnings. These premonitions. These memories,” and he pulls at his face, shifting it from young to old to dead to back again. “I would give you everything, but this is all that I have. Please don't ask for more.”

As though exhausted, he drops, collapsing on top of Jean and dissolving before the impact hits. He still feels the breath driven out of him, and he clutches his chest in shock.

  


* * *

  


He doesn't remember the warning until it's too late.

Spectre is at a full gallop beneath him, his hand already raised to press his lips to his knuckles for luck, and the scent hits him. Flowers and soap. It's drowned out immediately by the smell of sweat and horse and blood, and by the dry gas from the maneuver gear tanks. Too late, the Titan is already bearing down on him, and his are the cables that must trip the being.

Knowing what he does about them now, Jean tries to take them alive. They're working on the cure and it works more often than not; a whole race of reformed Titans, some of them showing promises of controlled shifting, in the rebuilt Shigashina. But some are too dangerous to catch alive, too violent, and as he swings into the trees and watches three of his best men narrowly avoid being crushed by blood-stained fists, he readied his blades.

“ _ Jean _ .”

Too late. He’s already in midair, swooping to make the twin cuts. The spray of blood fills his vision, and he feels more than sees his second cable miss the anchor. Knows that his momentum is going to crush him against the tree like an egg thrown at a wall, and his blood will join that of his fallen comrade, the woman he just slaughtered.

Jean reverses his grip and fires one last shot, holding the trigger to expel as much gas as he can, trying to slow down. Too late to know if it’ll work or not. The back of his head hits wood with a sickening sound, and blackness like a Titan’s mouth swallows him up.

  


* * *

  


They had to cut off all his hair again. Jean is washing it in the little iron bathtub, wary of the new scars in his scalp. It hurts his ego to think that he’s going to have a bald spot, but Connie had told him (shaken, but trying to laugh) that chicks dig bald guys, he would know.

A little splash is all his surprise when Marco appears at the end of the tub, arms crossed and resting on the rim.

“Was that on purpose?” he asks, eyes hard.

Jean tilts his head, eyeing the sleeves of Marco’s trainer uniform that seem fused to his body. A little bit of effort and they vanish. Marco jumps.

“Now we’re even,” Jean says, lounging back against the tub. “And to answer your question; no. It wasn't. Believe or not, I want to live, too.”

Marco sighs. “Good.” 

The ghost pillows his head on his arm, fingertips nearly touching the water. Jean should feel self conscious about being so exposed around someone else, but he nearly died and can’t bring himself to care. Besides…

“You ever think about me like this?” he asks, gesturing to his naked body. Not even he can resist the urge to obscure his cock with his thigh, but he keeps his arms on the sides of the tub in masculine confidence. “About sex. With me.”

Despite the fact that Marco’s ghost has aged to match Jean, his expression is heartbreakingly young. He stammers.

“... Yes,” he says at last. Jean eyes him for a moment longer, thinks ‘to hell with it’ and pats the water above his lap.

“Come here, then.”

Marco stares; then, once again without warning, appears to straddle Jean’s hips.

He jumps again, and the displacement of the water gives the illusion, if only for a moment, than Marco’s body has mass. The sight still has him stunned, and he raises a finger to trace the long, winding scar that curves like a giant bite down and across Marco’s chest.

“Well, that's morbid,” he says, trying to ignore the beating of his heart.

“You're the one who took off my shirt,” Marco says, looking down. “... you really liked my freckles, huh?”

“Guess so.” They’re everywhere, covering him like a blanket.  If Jean wiggles his legs he can make out the movement through Marco’s body, so he holds as still as he can and settles back to look up at the ghost.

“You loved me,” he says, pushing past his own blush. “Before I ever noticed. And I'm a greedy son of a bitch who almost died, so… tell me how you would have touched me. If you could have while you were alive.”

Marco's eyes are huge and dark but they time they’re full, warm like coffee and the night sky from the safety of his bedroom.

“Well,” and god, it's the most human he’s sounded since the whole thing started, “for one, I never really pictured myself on top.”

Jean splutters and laughs, too loud for such an enclosed space.  “Really? So, how many times in hand to hand did I actually--”

“Most of them. Not all,” he confesses, his skin tone as even as ever but Jean can hear a blush in his voice. “I was still figuring stuff out, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” and Jean tries to pull him closer on instinct; but his hands pass through cool air and he falters. “You figure things out now?”

Marco makes a point of moving down his body, the water in the tub still as he crawls backwards.

“I don't have much time,” he whispers, “but I always wanted to suck you off and have you come on my face. If-- if it matters,” he says, looking away, like he didn't slither down Jean’s body so his face was inches from his submerged dick. “You used to joke about connecting the dots on my cheeks anyway.”

Oh.

“You…” Jean licks his lips and leans in, willing Marco to somehow be warm and solid under his mouth. The contact instead is no more solid than swiping his hand through fog. “God, I wish I’d known. I wish you’d told me.”

“I did, Jean.” The air is warm around him from the steam of the bath as he closes his eyes. “You just didn't hear it.”

When he opens them again, the water has gone cold and Marco is gone.

  


* * *

  


Thirty years old and Jean still remembers the sound of that voice, untouched by time or cigarettes.

“I'm trying to keep you alive,” Marco says, sitting on the edge of Jean’s desk. Jean  takes his lips off the cigarette and blows a cloud of smoke at the ghost.

“Fuck off.”

Obedient as ever, Marco vanishes. Jean bites on the end of his cigarette and resists the urge to snuff it out on the back of his hand. The latest mission was a mess - no loss of life but a humiliating failure and a waste of resources. Pushing away Marco hurts, but it gives him the punishment he feels he needs.

“You need to relax.” Not so obedient, then. Jean sits back as Marco appears on his side of the desk, perched on the desk, long legs holding him up.

“Or what? I'll die of a heart attack?” Jean’s eyes dip down to Marco’s hips, where the leather straps disappear under the short wrapped skirt.

“You called me,” Marco says, meeting his gaze evenly. “Do you want this or not?”

“What’s ‘this’?” he fires back. In the time it takes for him to blink, Marco is half undress, down to his boots and pants and an open shirt. No scar down his chest, only sunkissed perfection like he hasn’t seen in a long time.  It’s unseemly for the Commander of the Military Police to be seen with prostitutes.

Ghosts, however. “Picking up from last time,” he murmurs, and Jean’s heartbeat pounds.

Last time. Jean barely remembers that. “How long has it felt for you?” he asks.

“Seconds,” Marco whispers, trailing his own fingers down his stomach, freckles blooming in his wake. “Lifetimes. I can’t tell.”

His eyes dart past the ghost to the door. “And you’ll know if someone’s coming?”

“Relax,” Marco repeats, sliding off the desk to straddle Jean’s lap, weightless on his thighs. 

“Easy for the dead to say,” Jean replies tartly, even as he feels blood fill his cock. “What are you here to save me from this time?”

Dark eyes meet his, reflecting the flickering light of the lantern hanging behind his chair, and Marco leans in. Once again, there’s no kiss, no contact, but as Marco tilts his head to the side Jean swears he feels breath on his ear.

“Touch yourself. Slowly.”

It’s not like him to take orders. He gives them all day, some good, some bad. It stings his ego how quickly he obeys a memory, a hallucination, and he bites his lip as he eases his pants out of the way.

“This how it’ll be?” he asks. “Not gonna do it yourself?”

The moan the ghost pours over him will haunt him for years. “Oh, Jean, if I could I would. You have no idea how much I wish I could feel you touch me.”

“Then do it,” Jean rasps, holding his hand still. Watches Marco sit up and wrap his hand around Jean’s cock. When he strokes it, Jean is a half-second behind him, a delayed reaction like lightning in the distance and the echo of the thunder.

“If I could have,” Marco whispers, “I would have touched you like this. Slow. Gentle.” Jean strangles his own groan in order to hear him better. “Make you wait for it like I did.”

His thumb circles the head and Jean follows his example, sinking his teeth into his tongue to keep quiet.

“I would have drawn it out until you got impatient,” and he paints the picture so clearly, what could have been, “and then I would have ridden you as hard and fast as you wanted.”

Jean gasps and suddenly Marco is even closer, both arms around his neck and completely naked on top of him. If he doesn’t look down, he can’t see his own hand around his cock and can imagine being inside the man on top of him; the man he’s loved so long it’s become a part of him, like a tree growing around barbed wire.

“I would have-- I would have--” and Marco sets his forehead against Jean’s, face flashing pale and asymmetrical. He shuts his eyes against the sight and focuses, dreaming of a world where this all could have been real.

When he opens his eyes again, Marco is gone, leaving nothing in his wake but the come all over Jean’s fingers.

  


* * *

  


Ten years pass. Twenty. Jean learns to be vigilant on his own, checking his gear, his food, his soldiers. The eagle eyed commander of the Survey Corps, the last of the 104th to wear the wings of freedom, outlasting the rest of his graduating class, the monarchy, even the walls themselves.

And yet, still, he knew there was something he was missing.

In the basement of the Research Facility lives a young woman encased in glass. Like a painting, like a statue, she has evaded the cruel touch of time. Jean crosses the room towards her, uneven gait echoing in the silent chamber. Click-tap, click-tap, click-tap.

Commander Dreyse does not turn at the sound of his cane. Her fingertips rest on the strange prism, the material that not even a diamond can scratch. 

“I loved her, you know,” she says. “As much as I could have loved anyone, as selfish as I was in those days.”

Jean looks past her at Annie. After all these years, the one he had once considered a terrifying monster looks like a child locked in a prison of her own making. After all these years, even knowing all that she had done, his heart is moved to silent pity.

“Do you think she loved you?” he asks, thinking of his own porcelain shadow.

“Oh, fuck no.” Hitch laughs, turns to face him with a twist of her lips. “I don’t even know if she could love, after what you told me. If she would have let herself.”

“The others did,” he counters. “Reiner. Bertholdt.”

“And they were torn to pieces, weren't they?” Hitch leans her back against the crystal, giving him her languid, catty stare. “I would rather be empty and immortal than open and rotting.”

Jean searches her eyes and wonders if he can see deception in there; that she wants to want a fate like Annie’s, or if it merely frightens her less.

“If she never comes out,” and he braces his fingertips on the crystal beside Hitch’s head, close enough to brush her hair, “is that even living?”

Hitch shrugs. “Who can say?” And her shoulder brushes his as he leaves, a jaunty swagger to her step. His eyes only follow her to the stairs, then return to Annie’s unchanged face.

Jean rests his forehead against the glass and know, no matter how hard Marco works, he will not live to see Annie awaken again.

  


* * *

  


  


Sixty two years old, Jean Kirstein closes his bedroom door behind him with a sigh. His bad leg has been playing up today, and he’s had to rely on his cane. Retirement is on the horizon for him. Even got a few good candidates lined up, good strong men and women with that delicate balance of compassion and practicality a Commander needs in peacetime.

And it is peacetime, finally, the last contracts of the new borders have been drawn up and their recruits have no horrific future to fear. It's been a tumultuous time, but in the end they’ve come out of it. He is the last of the 104th, last of the Survey Corps that served under Levi Ackerman and Erwin Smith, last of the Commanders who served alongside Shifters and knew Queen Historia by a different name. His other officers keep telling him to write a book, but it's never felt like his story to tell. It belonged to so many, and taking ownership feels like stealing.

Yet he’s been writing down what he remembers, just he cases he lives old enough to grow senile. Just in case peace ends before he does, and the wheel of fate turns to grind a new generation to blood and dust. It's this that he sets himself to now, wincing as he settled into his chair, writing by the lantern and the dwindling glow of the sun in the wonder beside him.

Jean sits up to stretch out a cramped shoulder, leg bouncing with anxiety, when he sees it.

“Oh,” he says to the young man standing in the door way, “I didn't hear you. Did you get lost on your way to the shitter or something?” He laughs, and points down the hall. “That way. Can't miss it.”

The soft, well worn boots make no sound on the floor. In fact, he doesn't walk at all; simply appears on the other side of Jean’s desk, eyes as warm and dark as strong tea.

“You remember me.”

Jean’s heart leaps, twists painfully in his chest. He swallows.

“It's been a long time, Marco. Here to-- warn me off something again? I stopped smoking, you know.”

Marco shakes his head.

“Then… here to correct something I wrote about you?” He holds up the journal. “You're a few chapters late for that. I'm almost to the death of Commander--”

Another sharp pain. Jean clutches his chest and winces, closing his eyes against the agony. Fear strikes him, one he can't seem to shake.

Until a hand reaches over and takes his. And he can feel it, as real as anything, and when he opens his eyes Marco has aged fifty years to catch up to him.

“I'm here for you,” he says, eyes brimming with tears. “This is as far as I could take you. Are you ready?”

No. He isn't. There's still so much he wanted to do. Make the life of his new commander a living hell. Drink that bottle of wine he’s been saving for six years. Finish this chapter in his journal, the one where Eren dies.

“Oh, Jean,” and those hands come up to hold his face, wipe away his own tears, leech away the ache in his chest and leave him numb like a hollow tooth. “I know. It's a frightening thing, to die. But it's even harder to live. And I am so proud of you for making it so far.”

Jean nods, feeling his body start to lean out of his chair. Of all the ways to go, by all accounts, this one isn't so bad.

“Just… tell me. This timeline-- this life.” Breathing is hard, and he grips the edge of the desk with white, scarred, knuckles. “Was it better with me in it?”

“It was,” Marco promises him, and at long last he can let go.

  


* * *

  


No one from his family attends the cremation, so Hitch dusts some of the excess ash from the jar and carries it back to her office as the crowd disperses. Her eyes are a little damp, but she held it together better than some of the Survey Corps had and she’d known him the longest of anyone gathered there. Her speech is folded up in her pocket and the sunset gives the illusion that the whole city is burning; around the corner, she turns to face the horizon and marvel at how far it stretches on without walls to cast her world in an early night.

In the corner of her eye, there’s a flash of familiar khaki; her heart leaps into her throat and Hitch spins on her heel to watch two little boys in oversized, outdated Survey uniforms dash past, their short arms lost in the sleeves. As soon as they appeared they vanish, laughing, down an alleyway.

The clay jar is still warm in her hands from the fire. Hitch allows herself a private smile and continues homeward.

She sets the jar on her desk, next to an unfinished book. She lights a lamp, readies a pen, and addresses what remains of Jean Kirstein.

“So,” she says. “On to the next chapter.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
